Quote

Thomas Paine's version of "you didn't build that":

"Separate an individual from society,and give him an island or a continent to possess,and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end,in all cases,that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore,of personal property,beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice,of gratitude,and of civilization,a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came"
Submitted by Leah

Administration

News and Analyses, A Foreign Perspective

Nearly all of these are English-edition daily newspapers. These sites have interesting editorials and essays, and many have links to other good news sources. We try to limit this list to those sites which are regularly updated, reliable, with a high percentage of “up” time.

A solitary buoy in the remote Southern Ocean has recorded a monster wave of 23.8 metres, the largest wave ever measured in the southern hemisphere.

By Peter Hannam

A wave rider buoy moored at Campbell Island off New Zealand’s South Island registered the huge wave on Tuesday, according to Tom Durrant, a senior oceanographer at Metocean, part of Meteorological Metservice of New Zealand (MetService).

The biggest wave ever recorded in the southern hemisphere was measured this week off New Zealand.

Photo: MetOcean

Since the buoy only registered the first 20 minutes of each three hours, “it’s quite possible, even probable, that there were much higher waves during this storm”, Dr Durrant said.

It eclipsed the previous record maximum individual 22.03 metres clocked at an Australian buoy south of Tasmania in 2012.

The so-called significant wave height for the event, which is an average of the top third of waves measured from their crest to trough, was registered at 14.9 metres.

That was also a record for the Southern Ocean – but shy of the 19-metre global significant wave height record set in the North Atlantic in 2013, Dr Durrant said.

The generator of the huge waves was a fast-developing low-pressure cell that travelled at the same speed as the waves it was forcing.

“Essentially the peak of the waves could stay under the storms for quite a long period of time, and that’s what allowed them to grow so rapidly,” Dr Durrant said.

The large wave was whipped up for a rapidly developing storm cell in the Southern Ocean.

Photo: MetOcean

The waves were roaring up the west coast of New Zealand on Thursday, and will hit North America in about a week’s time, he said.

Australian storms

The storm would have had little impact on southern Australia’s coast – unlike the intense low currently chilling and soaking a region from Victoria and Tasmania, up into NSW.

Snow is expected to settle on elevated regions above 1000 metres, with winds gusting to damaging speeds of 100 km/hour.

The region accounts for about 22 per cent of the planet’s oceans, and “it’s the most energetic part of the world’s oceans in terms of waves”, he said.

Behind the brightly painted exterior of Jalousie, one of Haiti’s largest slums, lies a community struggling with a lack of sanitation, intermittent electricity and rivers of plastic waste. Conservative estimates suggest more than 80,000 people now live in Jalousie, many of whom arrived after the 2010 earthquake, which the area miraculously escaped relatively unscathed. Life is often cramped, chaotic and challenging, but Jalousie’s people have dignity, hope and a sense of community, regardless of the poverty and oppression they face

Photographs: Tariq Zaidi

Jean Michelle (pictured right) helps his seven-year-old daughter, Fatdjoulie, with her homework, while Catrine Telamoure, who lives with Michelle and his three children, takes a nap. Michelle works as a car park security guard and has been living in this one room with his three children and Telamoure since 2004. Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas. Not only do two out of three people live on less than $2.41 a day – the national poverty line – but Haiti suffers from extreme inequality. More than 60% of people are illiterate and only just over one quarter have access to safe water

A woman carries water back to her home. Residents – including children – have to pay up to 35 cents for a five-gallon bucket, which weighs about 19kg. Getting sufficient clean water is a daily challenge, and cholera is also a major problem. In the aftermath of the earthquake, UN peacekeepers brought the disease to Haiti, and the resulting outbreak made close to 800,000 people sick and has claimed more than 10,000 lives since 2010

Tanzanian government accused of putting indigenous people at risk in order to grant foreign tourists access to Serengeti wildlife

Tourists on safari in the Ngorongoro crater, Tanzania. Photograph: Justus de Cuveland/imageBROKER/REX/Shutterstock

The Tanzanian government is putting foreign safari companies ahead of Maasai herding communities as environmental tensions grow on the fringes of the Serengeti national park, according to a new investigation.

Hundreds of homes have been burned and tens of thousands of people driven from ancestral land in Loliondo in the Ngorongoro district in recent years to benefit high-end tourists and a Middle Eastern royal family, says the report by the California-based thinktank the Oakland Institute.

Although carried out in the name of conservation, these measures enable wealthy foreigners to watch or hunt lions, zebra, wildebeest, giraffes and other wildlife, while the authorities exclude local people and their cattle from watering holes and arable land, the institute says.

The report, released on Thursday highlights the famine and fear caused by biodiversity loss, climate change, inequality and discrimination towards indigenous groups.

Losing the Serengeti: The Maasai Land that was to Run Forever uses previously unpublished correspondence, official documents, court testimonies and first-person testimony to examine the impact of two firms: Thomson Safaris based in the United States, and Otterlo Business Corporation based in the United Arab Emirates.

It says Thomson’s sister company, Tanzania Conservation Limited, is in a court battle with three Maasai villages over the ownership of 12,617 acres (5,106 hectares) of land in Loliondo which the company uses for safaris.

One Maasai quoted in the report said Thomson had built a camp in the middle of their village, blocking access. “Imagine, a stranger comes and constructs a big building in the centre of your home,” reads the testimony. “Our livestock cannot go to the waterhole – there is no other route for the villagers or their livestock.”

The report says villagers have been driven off, assaulted or arrested by local police, park rangers or security guards.

The restricted access to land has made the Maasai more vulnerable to famine during drought years, the report says, noting appeals that locals have made for the government to change policies because of growing numbers of malnourished children.

A Maasai villager contacted by the Guardian said access remained blocked and that uniformed agents had beaten, threatened or tied-up and driven off pastoralists, as recently as December.

Thomson strongly denies these accusations. It says Tanzania Conservation Limited employs 100% Maasai staff, allows cattle on the property to access seasonal water, and works with local communities and the government to conserve the savannah, improve access to water and formulate a sustainable grazing policy.

The company blames past conflicts on NGO activists who they say stirred up villagers and led to staff being assaulted by young warriors armed with clubs, spears, knives and poison arrows.

“These interventions have been played out to attract attention, provide stories, and to disrupt the working relationship between company and communities on the ground,” Rick Thomson, a director of Tanzania Conservation, wrote in an email to the Guardian. “In these events the endangered staff have a protocol of disengaging any way they can to avoid escalation, and reporting to the authorities any situation where any people and property, are physically threatened. These situations have been rare and no such events have occurred for the last four years.”

He said the company was not connected to government evictions of illegal residents in the national park, which is reserved for wildlife.

The report also claims Maasai have been driven off land as a result of government ties with Otterlo Business Corporation, which organises hunting trips for the royal family of the United Arab Emirates and their guests who fly into a custom-built landing strip in Loliondo.

Since Otterlo was first granted 400,000 hectares of land for hunting, the government has mounted successive eviction operations.

Gina Haspel, grilled about her time running a covert detention site where suspects were brutally interrogated during George W Bush’s “war on terror”, failed to explicitly condemn such techniques as immoral. Twice the hearing on Capitol Hill was interrupted by protesters, one of whom yelled: “Bloody Gina! You are a torturer,” before being dragged out by police.

Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, asked what Haspel would do as head of the CIA if Trump ordered waterboarding – which simulates drowning – on a high-value suspect. “Senator, I would advise,” she began, then restarted her answer: “I do not believe the president would ask me to do that.”

This prompted scornful laughter from the public gallery. During his presidential election campaign, Trump vowed to authorise waterboarding and “a hell of a lot worse”.

After a long pause, Haspel sought to explain: “But we have today in the US government other US government entities that conduct interrogations … I would advise anyone that asked me that the CIA is not the place to conduct interrogations. We do not have interrogators and we do not have interrogation expertise.”

She added: “CIA does not today conduct interrogations, we never did historically, and we’re not getting back in that business.”

But Senator Martin Heinrich, a Democrat, followed up, saying Haspel did not answer the question about what she would do if Trump ordered her to waterboard a detainee. Again Haspel deflected: “I would not restart under any circumstances an interrogation program at CIA, under any circumstances.”

The questions came during Haspel’s confirmation hearing before the Senate intelligence committee, on Wednesday, which precedes a Senate vote. Given her unwillingness to condemn the possibility of other government agencies carrying out such techniques, Heinrich summed up the frustration of many Democrats on the committee by responding: “You’re giving very legalistic answers to very fundamentally moral questions.”

But Haspel received a major boost when the Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia announced he would support her nomination. “After meeting with Gina Haspel, discussing her extensive experience as a CIA agent, and considering her time as acting director, I will vote to confirm her to be our next CIA director,” he said. “I have found Gina Haspel to be a person of great character.”

Later, on Wednesday night, Senator John McCain, a Republican of Arizona, urged the Senate to reject Haspel’s nomination after he said she “failed to account for the mistakes the country made in torturing detainees held in US custody after the September 11th attacks”.

“I believe Gina Haspel is a patriot who loves our country and has devoted her professional life to its service and defense,” McCain said in a statement.

“However, Ms. Haspel’s role in overseeing the use of torture by Americans is disturbing. Her refusal to acknowledge torture’s immorality is disqualifying. I believe the Senate should exercise its duty of advice and consent and reject this nomination.”

McCain, a navy veteran who was himself tortured and detained for more than five years in a North Vietnamese prison, is perhaps the Senate’s fiercest opponent of the kinds of brutal interrogation techniques that were used by the CIA after 9/11 to extract information from al-Qaida detainees.

McCain, who was diagnosed with a deadly form of brain cancer last summer, is in Arizona recovering from his treatment and has not returned to Washington since December. It is unclear if he will be present to vote on Haspel’s confirmation.

McCain, who was diagnosed with a deadly form of brain cancer last summer, is in Arizona recovering from his treatment and has not returned to Washington since December. It is unclear if he will be present to vote on Haspel’s confirmation.

In 2002, Haspel, an undercover officer for most of her 33-year career, served as CIA station chief in Thailand, where the agency ran one of the “black sites” where suspected al-Qaida extremists were interrogated using procedures that included waterboarding.

In 2005 she supported destroying videotapes that documented the interrogations of the inmates. On Wednesday she claimed this was because of fears they could be leaked and fall into the hands of al-Qaida, endangering American lives, though she would no longer endorse such an act today.

Haspel, 61, deputy director and currently acting director of the CIA, said she did not have any social media accounts, “but otherwise I think you will find me to be a typical middle-class American” with a keen sense of right and wrong.

She said she did not wish to “trumpet” her status as the first woman nominated for director but there has been an “outpouring of support from young women at the CIA who consider it a good sign for their own prospects”.

She told the committee: “After 9/11, I didn’t look to go to the Swiss desk. I stepped up. I was not on the sidelines.” She said of the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks: “Having served in that tumultuous time, I can offer you my personal commitment, clearly and without reservation, that under my leadership, on my watch, CIA will not restart such a detention and interrogation programme.”

But while Republican members of the committee lavished praise on her career service, Democrats asked tough questions about her record. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the committee, wondered whether the CIA’s interrogation programme had been consistent with American values.

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